The Glimpse: Speculative Interpretations of Men’s Style Constructed Through Fragmented Memories of Film

Nick Clements

This research seeks to identify the momentary act of assessment and interpretation of visual cues that, after being archived in the researcher’s memory, manifest in flawed recollections and speculative interpretations. The ‘glimpse’ is a multi-disciplinary, practice-based project that presents various forms of photographic representation gleaned from fragmented memories, which are described in the research as ‘speculative photography’. For the Istituto Marangoni Research Exhibition this is embodied in a series of photographic tableau generated by subjective memories of cinema, in which the participants are dressed and arranged as if on a movie-set for a film that was never made. However, these are not found images from a flea market or obtained through a series of written instructions to a generative AI platform, but staged re-enactments, and what Baudrillard and Eco might have likened to examples of the ‘simulacrum’ and the ‘hyperreal’. There is aliminal aspect to the glimpse that is connected with the process of photography, but cannot be compared to the exactitude of a photograph. The experimental filmmaker Peter Kubelka, who said that the real narrative was created ‘between the frames’, perhaps offers some indication as to the location and availability of a mind-image gathered during a glimpse event. It is proposed here that memories gathered during Heidegger’s ‘augenblick’ (blink of an eye), when a momentary glance can reveal an all-encompassing truth, exist in an uncertain liminal landscape somewhere in the mind and, like Kubelka’s space between the frames, are seldom solid or available for instant or accurate recall. Sontag reminds us that, ‘A photograph is not just the result of an encounter between an event and a photographer; picture-taking is an event in itself’. Thus, this research asserts that the event of the ‘glimpse’ is the point at which many variables are aligned, causing a ‘glimpse event’ of extreme clarity to be experienced. This might be described as ‘mind photography’. Accordingly, the photographs presented here are flawed reconstructions from the researcher’s own liminal landscape of mental images, experienced as glimpse events during exposure to cinematic images that flicker in front of the eye at 25 frames per second.

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